Milton's pamphlet Areopagitica called for free political discussion. No one person has access to truth. (Leaders who say they own truth are usually tyrants and should not be trusted.) Listening to each other in the free commonwealth of ideas may lead to better understanding and more effective action.

Tuesday, October 02, 2007

Returning Blogs

On Tuesday 2nd October, the Server hosting several sites is partly back on stream after it had been wiped by a hacker attack. Somebody has been working very hard.Atlantic Free Press is back and so is Chris Floyd who has made comment on the attack.A test of Craig Murray's site is online. The internal links still don't work - they still refer to the .co.uk address. This is simply corrected by editing the link in the Address bar and replacing .co.uk with .org.uk

1 Comments:

Anonymous said...

A Very Spooky Affair

The wipeout on Sunday 30th September of the Server which hosts Atlantic Free Press, Chris Floyd and hosting Craig Murray from Monday 1st October illustrates another side of the war on voices which the powerful would like to see silenced. Targeted hacking of this severity isn't likely to be traceable at all. This has been a professional, sustained and deliberately targeted attack to silence the sites hosted. The source of the attack is neither any conventional criminal nor some sad geek.

It might be worth considering whether a vindictive Usmanov, after his lawyers' (Schillers) interventions to silence Craig Murray's (and other) sites have so spectacularly backfired, had sought other methods to silence Murray and his friends. He will have access to the skills required through his power and influence in Russia. But if so, and if such resources could be deployed according to his bidding, then why is it that all of those blogs and sites which have reprinted Murray's original article appear to be trouble-free? And why would Usmanov repeat his mistake in another field? Given his published history, the man can not be entirely stupid albeit that clever and arrogant men have been known to behave in stupid ways.

I think it would be a mistake to fall into the trap of attributing this particular malice to a rich Uzbekistani (of unknown political allegiance and uncertain faith). Perhaps that cannot be ruled out but the argument is not strong enough to be taken as far as an attribution.

Someone of intelligence might take the view that the Usmanov affair provided the opportunity to exploit a misattribution of cause to screen the range of answers to these questions:

Who is behind this attack?Who would like to silence voices of clarity such as these?And what institutions and alliances or what friends of the rich have the power to so direct the use of skills and resources to thoroughly obliterate – not merely interfere with - the server run by Richard Kastelein and his associates?